Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

I do think YC has become chasers of the latest trend rather than creating the trend. That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.

Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped companies and it really seems that the a-level players are missing.

Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and care.

I think now I see YC more like a job for the partners than a passion.

I might be wrong but there is definitely something to it that YC has not had a success for a very long time.

It's really sad because YC is one of the best things to happen to the tech industry.

View on HN

Well it’s a function of those that apply and are accepted, and pitches are going to reflect the current hype. YC occasionally puts out a call for applications in areas they think are interesting but perhaps they haven’t seen many compelling pitches for. Have they recently put out a call for specific areas of interest?

Yeah I think they do it every batch or at least every year. https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

Thanks, I see that one is full of AI, but I notice they are guiding toward specific areas, probably so they don’t get a thousand vague AI pitches

Except now their call for startups are focusing on tech solutions (use LLMS to do x), instead of focusing on problems that need solving. They're now doing exactly what they've railed against, solutions in search of problems

> That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.

Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat forums.

All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They got lucky, made millions with zero new ideas. People connected the same way on AOL 15 years before.

Like most Silicon Valley innovations, you just reuse an existing idea or resell polished turds as new.

and before that, there were literal community message boards. corkboard at the grocery store. people gossiped before there was Facebook. the only real innovation was going from verbal communication to the written word, but now with TikTok, we're back at verbal communication, just with a lot of extra steps. there's no other innovation that's happened in the world since writing, isn't there?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com